Yahoooooooooooo Dome

So, I hung out in my hotel room until like 4pm watching Koshien and writing about Sasebo, and then I went to the Yahoo Dome for the Fighters-Hawks game.



Got there around 5ish... went in... immediately ran into some Tokyo friends I know, found a seat in the middle back of the section and then a lady named Hashimoto came up to chat with me, I met her here in Kyushu last year. (She said "I see you on TV all the time at games! I hoped you'd come back here someday!") But she didn't think there were any free seats in her area.

I went off and got a Matsunaka bento and stuff, came back, sat down... the women in front of me were in town from Hokkaido and they were interesting so I chatted with them, and then of all the people to randomly come in and sit down next to me, my friend Ogasawara showed up! I was pretty shocked, since he lives in Nagoya and all. He pointed out that most of the time when we see each other we're both travelling anyway. Also, he was actually sitting next to a guy named Matsuda who's also famous for travelling to see the Fighters a ton, only I don't remember seeing him ever before.

Matsuda was kind of obnoxious and kept talking to me in broken English and talking about me loudly to other people too, and he was even like "don't we have to speak English to her?" Ogasawara's telling him "No, she speaks really good Japanese, and you really shouldn't pick on her like that", and then he kept apologizing to me for his friend's behavior. But other than that I was actually really happy to see him again, we spent a lot of downtime between the innings chatting about travel and Hokkaido and other stuff, he's a really nice guy.

The women in front of me, we also spent a while chatting. One lady is from Hakodate and had a Fighty happi coat and wore a Pikachu hat, so when my friend Sakamoto emailed me like "I'm watching the game on TV, where are you?" I was like "Look for the lady with the Pikachu hat, we're in front of the Inaba banner" and a little while later he wrote back "oh! I saw you, you're wearing your green towel and your Tsuboi shirt?" "Yeah."

UNFORTUNATELY, however, the Fighters lost. I think Darvish stayed in way too long. We were kind of leading 2-1 for a while but then it all went away on Jose Ortiz's SECOND home run of the day -- sheesh. The weird thing is, thanks to the swine flu, the Fighters have half of their roster sick at home right now, so our lineup was like, Chon-so Yoh, Kazuya Murata... Sho Nakata at DH, Naoto Inada playing SECOND BASE, our catcher was Satoshi Nakajima... yeah. It's going to really suck if the flu effectively takes down our team, seriously. The Hawks eventually won the game 6-2, though I will point out that when the game ended we had the bases loaded and Shinji Takahashi at the plate, so it really could have been evened out with one swing if they'd gotten lucky. Alas.



Here I am with the group of women. The one all the way on the left actually lives in Nagasaki now but she's from Sapporo. Pikachu-lady was staying at the Hawks Hotel so we left her at the stadium, but I walked back to Tojinmachi and took the subway back to Hakata station with the other two, chatting about the Fighters the whole way.

I'm really exhausted. I stayed up talking to Carl for a while when I got back here anyway. He and Oren went to Dazaifu today, which has a shrine famous for praying for scholarship and learning, so he got me a mamori charm for studying, in theory for when I study to take the JLPT 2-kyuu this year.

Yawn. Tomorrow, onwards to Shikoku. I can't believe this trip is almost at an end, and at the same time I'm kind of looking forward to getting home.

Hakata -> Kochi

This morning we woke up, checked out of our hotel, and met up with Christina at Hakata station, as we were putting bags into lockers. We found a taiyaki place not open yet, and then took the subway to Tenjin and went around there for a while before opting for some tonkotsu ramen for lunch. Only, we went to Ichiran, which means that really we were eating together at a place meant for people to eat alone. Still good ramen though.

We tried to wander up the side of a building with a step garden in it but it was closed, and we went through a music festival, then ended up walking to Gion, pretty much. There was a temple there, and I insisted we get a photo with the four of us:



After the temple, we went to a Hakata museum of sorts and learned about city life there a hundred years ago. Carl got accosted by a bunch of Taiwanese tourist girls. They wanted to take a photo with all of us crazy white people, so I insisted on getting a photo with my camera too.



In the next building over, we also saw an Ancient Japanese Computer:



(You either get that joke or not -- it's a Jacquard loom, which is basically the first machine to ever use punched cards to program a series of instructions, see.)

And then, well, we ended up having to bail on Christina and make our way over to the train station and go to Shikoku. Though we did first stop in the taiyaki place and have taiyaki-softcream sets.

The train ride to Shikoku wasn't too bad. Hikari shinkansen to Okayama, then the Marine Liner or whatever from Okayama to Kochi. The sunset was pretty, and getting to actually cross the Seto-Ohashi while it was still light out was good, although a little too bright at the time. And the bathroom on the train was pretty scary.

We got to Kochi, found our hotel, checked in, and went to get dinner at a Tosa-ryori type place, ie, Kochi home cooking. Oren had his own set and Carl and I split a bunch of things like katsuo tataki, tosa age dofu, tosa maki, some nagaimo-age, a salad, I forget if there was anything else. The katsuo tataki really WAS awesome, as recommended by one of my friends.

Carl and I walked around the big covered street Obiyamachi for a bit. A lot of shops were closed and I was joking we'd find a taiyaki place... and amazingly, we DID. The guy was closing up soon and he told us he only had red bean taiyaki left and one chocolate, so I got the chocolate one and he gave Carl a red bean one for free. Wacky.

Oh, and I passed a gamecenter and was like "That CAN'T be..." and walked in and sure enough...



It's funny, I remember being totally excited to find a DDR MAX machine back in 2003, for the sake of playing Bye Bye Baby Balloon. Now it's more like "WTF is this still doing here?" more than anything, being as I can't/don't really play DDR anymore. They also had a pretty old Pop'n machine, I think it was Fever, which is now like 3 mixes ago?

Anyway, back at the hotel (which is REALLY nice, by the way), unable to do laundry today (mostly because Carl is using 2/3 of the machines). It's not a problem assuming that I can actually do a straight shot back to Tokyo from Kochi on Monday -- but if I get delayed anywhere, I'm going to have issues with clean clothes. Hrm.

Teikyo lost to Gifu Shogyo today. Sigh. I don't know WTF happened because I didn't see the game, but the pitching order confuses me. Alas. I guess now the hope is for a Gifu-Chukyo final, which is about as close to a subway series as you get in Koshien.

Gonna go sleep, hopefully wake up early tomorrow and go to the ballpark here and uh, see Hideki Irabu pitch. That should be FUCKING WEIRD.